you left your shadow here ; yeonbin

7

They stayed like that for a while, Soobin resting with his arm draped over his eyes while inhaling sharp and fast but recovering more with every passing minute.
Beomgyu swapped caring glances between Soobin and Yeonjun whose transfixed eyes sent out sparks.

It sliced through the air like a forecasting thunder in the middle of a drought when Soobin sighed, “is every show going to be like this?“
If there was a chuckle swinging in his voice it drowned in a spent cough.

Beomgyu went to grab a glass of water for him and then retreated behind the kitchen aisle, while Yeonjun sat down on the armrest closest to Soobin.
His heart throbbed and pulsed with the intensity of the side-effects Soobin's powers had caused him, unable to lean into comforting cushions and relax just yet as his mind replayed the reminder how badly they needed those books and how little of a clue they had where to start looking.

“Doubtful. Black Charon has a way of striking once just to prove they're more powerful, that betrayal has its consequences and that if we were to provoke them, they would have every intention and resources to end us.”

Soobin's arm slipped from his eyes at Yeonjun's words.

“Like a game of sparing you once as a warning but remaining infiltrated in your life to see you struggling and emphasising that you would have been better off if you had stayed loyal,” Yeonjun huffed.
He had often thought about whether it would have been easier if he had stayed with Black Charon, but he was sure that it would have done nothing but slowly destroy him — being the cause of harm and destruction, pushing until he crashed beyond his limits during magical training, always looking for trouble just to prove something.

“What did they do to you after you left?“ he asked in a breathy voice, familiar with hidden shifts and unspoken thoughts in Yeonjun's words.

“Charon shot me twice, and while he had definitely hoped to get rid of me once and for all, they never came back to finish what they've started,” Yeonjun admitted, the scarred entry points of the bullets tingling and burning like a fresh wound, “I was lucky Beomgyu knew where to find Taehyun.“

Taehyun had been studying medicine, once meaning to become a surgeon before he had dropped out of university and left the academic path altogether — he went what others would call astray, making selling substances his shaky way of keeping his head above water.
Beomgyu and Taehyun had met by what would have been mischance — Taehyun, helpless to hear or see Beomgyu coming, pinned to the wall with a knife against his throat just because he was in search of his client.

What Taehyun did know was that his client was working the nights at a local narcotics store, what he couldn't know however, was that this exact narcotics store and its cash had fallen victim to Yeonjun and Beomgyu's desperate poverty, the hapless guy Taehyun had come to sell the drugs to laying knocked out against the counter (they had intended to keep it peaceful — Beomgyu strangling the lights, slipping in, slipping out, money in his hands — but when the guy had started thrashing and screaming at the sudden darkness, they hadn't seen any other way to shut him up fast enough before his fuss would have come to somebody's unwanted attention.)

Yeonjun's trust passed as a tough thing to gain, Beomgyu however, — all lights and stars in his soul — had found sympathy in Taehyun's worn-out, famished complexion and value in his persona; after he had removed the knife from his throat and convinced him to silence his panicked ramblings that is.

Their encounter turned out to be anything but a mischance and Beomgyu's unasked way of prying about Taehyun's usual pursuits and whereabouts a lucky revolt against Yeonjun's distrust.

Because no more than two weeks later, after a rough week and an even rougher and involuntary encounter with a circle of people that Yeonjun and Beomgyu knew better than they liked to admit sometimes, Yeonjun had one bullet stuck in his side and another in his arm.